How do Bitcoin and Ethereum differ?

When crypto-currency is discussed, Bitcoin seems to dominate the whole industry, but now Ethereum has taken the field, giving Bitcoin a run for its money. Ethereum is rising above the ranks and
has managed to attract a lot of publicity for its range of additional features and applications not available in the renewed Bitcoin.

The first element of Ethereum that separates it from other cryptocurrency, including Bitcoin, is that goes beyond the normal boundaries of digital currency. It is a blockchain platform with
a wide range of aspects, such as smart contracts which facilitates a wide range of peer to peer contracts in their Ether (name of Ethereum currency) transactions.

Ethereum’s featured smart contracts create blockchain stored applications for contract facilitation and negotiation. These contracts are better because they offer a decentralized method that
verifies and enforces contractual obligations, which removes the possibilities of frauds and scams, making the prevalence of censorship impossible. This is why Ethereum has more support than ever
before, because the system offers tight-knit security, making every transaction and agreement more cost-effective than any other crypto currency platform.

While the average block time of Bitcoin amounts to almost 10 minutes, Ethereum sought to decrease the block time drastically and succeeded in timing theirs to 12 seconds! This quick time is
possibly because of the default system in Ethereum’s GHOST protocol. A faster block time establishes a more efficient brand in Ethereum, especially since it's a lot less than that of Bitcoin.

Another crucial difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin is the monetary supply. More than seventy-five percent of all available Bitcoin has already been mined, with the initial miners being
nearly facilitated to capacity. Ethereum, in this regards, is able to conserve their money reserve by implementing a pre-sale, ensuring that half of their supply will be retained up to the fifth
year of launch, which in turn, creates more benefits for all those already invested in Ethereum.

Bitcoin and Ethereum also value their transactions in different ways. In Ethereum, it is called Gas, and the price of a transaction depends on three factors: storage needs, complexity, and
bandwidth. Bitcoin, on the other hand, limit their transactions by block size, forcing competition with each other.

Despite Bitcoin ruling the cryptocurrency game right now, Etheruem is quickly rising among the ranks, causing the market to evaluate each currency's benefits in accordance to their financial
trajectories. They are not the same thing and should not be considered as such. The success of one platform does not affect the success of other. While Bitcoin does have a strong crypto currency
foundation, Ethereum sets out to do more with their added features.